


Lifelong Learning

by Siria



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25312708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: Nile never planned on being career military. One tour, two max, and she was going to get out and go to college.
Comments: 68
Kudos: 543





	Lifelong Learning

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [sheafrotherdon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon) for betaing.

Nile never planned on being career military. One tour, two max, and she was going to get out and go to college. Even with the GI Bill paying a chunk of her tuition, her dream of going to the Art Institute would still be out of reach, but Chicago State or UIC were both doable if she lived at home and worked part-time. She knew her aunties would tut about her majoring in art history—why couldn't she be practical like her cousins, the engineer or the accountant or the paralegal?—but that was all she'd ever felt drawn to.

"Life's short, you know?" she'd told Dizzy, the two of them sharing a mostly pulverised bag of Doritos from her latest care package. "Why not do something I care about?"

Except the joke was on her. Life, it turned out, was looking to be pretty long as far as she was concerned, and maybe military was the only proper career she'd ever have.

"You can still go to university, you know," Joe said over dinner one evening. They were sitting at a table outside of a hole-in-the-wall bistro somewhere in the south of France. Joe and Nicky had once again impressed Nile with just how many carbs they were able to pack away in a single sitting, and now they were lingering over a couple of bottles of wine and some dessert while the sun sank towards the horizon. "It's doable, once you get the paperwork right and you pay upfront. Nicky's been to university a few times now. Knows a lot about poems and rocks."

"It's true," Nicky said, topping up his glass. "I think I'm what they call a non-traditional student."

Joe snickered.

"You don't get bored?" Nile asked, picking at the remains of her dessert. "I mean, you two are, you know... You've lived through it all and it's not like any of us can really use a degree for anything anyway."

"That," Joe said, pointing at her, "is a very reductive and utilitarian attitude and is the kind of thing people say when they do not have poetry in their soul! And I am disappointed to hear you say it, Nile Freeman, when I know you have the soul of both a warrior and a poet."

He lapsed into Arabic, reciting something Nile couldn't understand. She could guess at the meaning, though—Nicky cast a long-suffering look up at the twilight sky, but she was pretty sure that he and Joe were playing footsie under the table.

"What Joe means to say," Nicky said, "is we can be practical when we want to be. We both got a medical degree in Cuba in... when was it, 1958? '59?"

"Not practical for _us_ , exactly," Joe said. "But we've bumped into a few people over the years who've been glad of our help."

Nicky leaned in to Nile and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, "Joe is very proud of how neat his stitches are. He thinks it reflects well on him as an artist."

"Why be sloppy!" Joe cried, spreading his arms wide. "If you're sloppy you leave a scar, and that's no good. Well." He cocked his head and made a show of considering. "Unless you want to leave a scar, but that's an entirely different matter."

"You can be practical, and you must remember that there's always something new to learn," Nicky said. "You'll see. The world may be small but the people who inhabit it make it big, make it change. But the real question is what do you want to do, hrm? _Really_ want. You must want to do something, or you wouldn't have brought it up."

"I guess," Nile said. She took a sip of her wine, considering. It was weird, having so many possibilities. Even stranger not to have to weigh student loans, or family approval, or initial starting salaries, or health benefits, or how long a commute she was willing to put up with in Chicago in the winter. She knew that the others had a network of people they could draw on to come up with solid papers for her. She also had the vague sense that they were jointly sitting on a lot of cash and didn't care very much about what or who they spent it on.

Nile could give herself whatever name she wanted and go lose herself in Amsterdam or Bologna or Johannesburg for four years. She could study art history, or sculpture, or photography. She could bury her nose in her books and attend every lecture, or scramble her way through with passing grades, paying attention only to what interested her—maybe that was the wildest thought of all for a daughter of Cheryl Freeman, a woman who thought any grade below an A- was an affront to the Lord himself.

And no matter what Nile chose to do, she'd never be able to walk across a stage in cap and gown and know her mom and brother were in the audience, cheering her on.

"I'll have to think about it," was all she said, and finished off her glass.

"You have time," Nicky said, with a hitch of one shoulder.

"Just don't ask Andy," Joe said, pushing the last of his tarte tatin over to Nicky. "She thinks universities are very newfangled things, and she'll get that look on her face—you know the one—and start asking what went wrong with apprenticeships. How can something be an educational system if most people don't know how to butcher a whole deer anymore, or re-shoe a horse..."

"She is a very practical woman," Nicky said. "Also not necessarily wrong. You remember that winter in the Caucasus—"

"No part of me will ever forget that winter in the Caucasus," Joe said. "Especially not my toes or my balls."

"Anyway," Nile said hurriedly, because several months spent travelling with Joe and Nicky had made her very skilled in changing a conversational topic. "Take my time, think it over, figure out what I want that's just for me, and then… then just go for it—that's what you're saying."

"Now you're learning," Nicky said.


End file.
